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By Zoocha on
Guys & St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust is one of the UK's leading providers of hospital and community-based healthcare, medical research and education. The trust operates five main hospitals that have been at the forefront of medical innovation for hundreds of years:
- St Thomas' Hospital is the oldest, having been founded in 1100’s
- Guy's Hospital was founded in the 1720’s
- Evelina London Children's Hospital was founded in 1869
- Royal Brompton Hospital dates from the 1840’s
- Harefield Hospital was founded in 1915
The trust employs over 22,000 people and includes one of the busiest emergency departments (A&E) in London.
The trust required a new website that would:
- Provide patients and their families with important information about the hospitals and services
- Communicate the organisational structure, vision and activity as well as the rich histories of each of the hospitals
- Provide GPs with up-to-date referral information
- Engage with stakeholders and provide accountability to members
Why Drupal was chosen:
When commencing the procurement of a digital partner to deliver the new website, the trust had not decided on, or ruled out any CMS solutions. Drupal was ultimate chosen because:
- It is open source
- Can be easily integrated with other 3rd party systems
- Provides the granular roles and permissions and workflows for a large, complex organisation
- Is flexible and scalable for future functionality and growth of the organisation
- Has a rich ecosystem of developers and services providers
- Is a proven enterprise scale platform for delivery rich digital experiences
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The goals were:
- an improved experience for website users
- improved performance of the website on different devices
- improved support for recruitment
- more effective use of centrally available content and tools provided via NHS Digital and the NHS website
- compliance with GDPR and EU accessibility standards
The users include: patients, their families and carers, the public and visitors, Foundation Trust members, job seekers, media, local stakeholders, and other health professionals.
The new website needed to be simple to use and easy to navigate, featuring content which is easy to understand, informative and engaging, and be underpinned by an effective search function. It needed to be able to offer patients a single point of access to automated tools and services (for example access to appointment systems, health records, etc).
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 9.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Diff
As a content heavy site, editors frequently need to reference older revisions of the content when making updates. The diff module provides an elegant way of navigating through content history for content writers.
Zoocha also took advantage of this well documented module and implemented an additional layer of functionality on top of it, taking inspiration from another contrib module `preview_link`. Revisions on GSTT can now be privately shared to external stakeholders, who can review these unpublished content with a token link, without needing to have an account on the Drupal site.
Parent Node
A minimal (contrib) module (developed by Zoocha) that models the content architecture present in many content types in the LocalGov distro, where you can link pages together in a parent/children relationship. While conceptually simple, this relationship goes on to power many parts of the site, including a natural and semantic URL patterns, content mini hubs (such as services and health information pages)
Search API/Search API Solr
Zoocha’s go-to when we need to implement a powerful site-wide full text search. With thousands of pages spanning various content types, Search API allows users to quickly look up the most relevant content. From the content side, the client is also able to fine tune the ranking of different content types so that the most important pages will always reach its audience first.
Many other helper modules are also utilised to supercharge the on-site search, including search_api_autocomplete, search_api_spellcheck, search_api_synonym, providing users a natural way to browse even the most niche section of the website.
Paragraph
The paragraphs module embraces modularity and flexibility of building content with reusable components. This guarantees that components are always consistent across the sites, while granting editors the freedom to transition from one content section to another with ease.
Webform
Another staple contrib module, the webform module comes with an intuitive user interface for the digital team to create interactive forms with a multitude of question options. The team is also able to add customisable email triggers, such that they can receive form submissions like website feedbacks in a timely manner.
Community contributions:
Diff preview was developed as an extension to the popular Diff module that implements a token-based access system for anonymous users to view the difference between two revisions.
This can be useful for external content reviewers who do not have an account on the website to approve or reject certain content changes.
An expiry date can also be set on each preview links so access can be revoked once the date has passed.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Sectors:
Government
Healthcare
